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Released: Guantánamo’s Most Famous Prisoner, Held for 14 Years Without Charge

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, believed to be the last inmate from Mauritania held at the facility in Cuba, wrote the best-selling book, “Guantanamo Diary”.

A Mauritanian official says a former al-Qaida militant who gained fame with the publication of a diary about life at the USA detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has arrived in his country after almost 14 years of detention.

Slahi has said he plans on rejoining his family and starting a business in his native country of Mauritania. Slahi was never charged [Guardian report] with an offense during his time in confinement. According to a Senate report, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a special interrogation practices for Slahi at Guantanamo, including the use of dogs and sleep and sensory deprivation. In 2001, Slahi was detained there and sent to an American prison in Jordan.

Two pages from “Guantanamo Diary” that were redacted by the USA government. No criminal charges were ever pressed against him, but U.S. interrogators pushed Slahi for any information about his cousin and former brother-in-law, Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, who served as a lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden. His handwritten memoir was eventually published with numerous redactions after a lengthy legal battle and negotiations to get the USA government to declassify it. But 14 years after he first became a detainee at the infamous facility – during the time in which he wrote of his ordeal in the book “Guantanamo Diary” – he has finally been released.

Nancy Hollander, one of Slahi’s attorneys, said her client “wants nothing more than to be with his family and rebuild his life”. “According to a Justice Department investigation, he was beaten, sexually throttled, put in extreme isolation, shackled to the floor, stripped naked and put under strobe lights while being blasted with heavy metal music”. I heard my family in a casual familial conversation.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi landed in the capital on a USA military plane, said Lemine Mohamed, the police chief in Nouakchott.

In July, an interagency review board approved Slahi’s release, pending negotiations with his home country of Mauritania.

A profile of Slahi read at the beginning of the June hearing called Slahi by his prisoner identification number, MR-760, and noted that “Throughout his detention, MR-760 has maintained his support for jihad, but clarifies that his notion of jihad neither condones the killing of innocent people nor supports Bin Ladin’s ‘version of justice'”.